News Blog

Blog Topic: Infectious Disease

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March 05, 2020

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised that it’s not a question of whether the outbreak of a coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2 (and its associated disease, COVID-19) would spread in U.S. communities, but when — and we should be prepared for potential disruptions in our daily lives as a result.

April 16, 2018

Vaccines are widely recognized as one of the world’s most successful and cost-effective health interventions. Ahead of this year’s World Immunization Week – celebrated in the last week of April – we’re reviewing some of the most important vaccine breakthroughs in recent history, as well as a looking to the future of vaccine development for diseases like HIV/AIDS, Zika, and Herpes.

January 05, 2018

“Don’t go outside with wet hair, you’ll catch a cold!” We’ve all heard this and other “facts” about how you might catch a cold, but which ones are true and which are simply something to sneeze at? We sat down with Anne Norris, MD, an associate professor of Infectious Diseases, to find out.

August 23, 2017

In 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published guidelines on surgical site infection prevention. The update to that guideline began over five years ago, but Ebola, Zika and other national and international healthcare emergencies delayed its completion. The news blog checked in with Penn Medicine's Craig Umscheid to see what the major takeaways are from this guideline and how it can improve the safety of surgical procedures.

July 07, 2017

When he was approached by a colleague about writing for a magazine with the theme “unspeakables and ineffables,” Lary Campbell had one idea for a personal essay that kept coming to mind. He had doubts about sharing it, though. The colleague, Lisa Jacobs, knew Campbell was an accomplished playwright and filmmaker who would be a talented contributor to the second issue of the magazine she had founded, Penndulum. She didn’t know that Campbell was HIV positive.

June 28, 2017

Last year, Helen Koenig, MD, an infectious disease expert at Penn Medicine, met a married couple faced with an uncommon fertility challenge they wanted to safely overcome: The husband is HIV positive and the wife is not. Every day, 400 babies are born HIV positive around the world, but with newer technologies and discoveries, having healthy, HIV-free children has become a reality for more and more couples.

June 09, 2017

Prevention is still our best weapon against HIV. One prevention method that has gained a lot of public attention in recent years is pre-exposure prophylaxis, also known as PrEP. Daily PrEP use can lower the risk of getting HIV from sex by more than 90 percent and from injection drug use by more than 70 percent—but the challenge with PrEP, like many other daily medications, is adherence. That’s where Penn Medicine's Helen Koenig and recent Perelman School of Medicine graduate Giffin Daughtridge come in.

April 17, 2017

Many people might not have heard of the Aedes aegypti mosquito until this past year, when the mosquito, and the disease it can carry – Zika – began to make headlines. But more than 220 years ago, this same breed of mosquito was spreading a different and deadly epidemic right here in Philadelphia and just like Zika, this epidemic is seeing a modern resurgence, with Brazil at its epicenter.

Showing 11-20 of 64

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